On the Possibility of a General Purge of Self-Reference

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to gather some evident in favor of the view that a general purge of self-reference is possible. I do this by considering a modal-epistemic version of the Liar Paradox introduced by Roy Cook. Using yabloesque techniques, I show that it is possible to transform this circular paradoxical construction (and other constructions as well) into an infinitary construction lacking any sort of circularity. Moreover, contrary to Cook’s approach, I think that this can be done without using any controversial multimodal rules, i.e., the usual rules from normal epistemic and modal logic are enough to show the paradoxicality of the infinitary construction.

Keywords

• yablo’s paradox
• self-reference
• infinitary logic
• modal logic